Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Conspiracy theories, a noose around the neck of truth and human civility

If you think that trump’s megaphone declaring the main
stream media “fake news” and the Russian investigation a ‘which hunt’ and his
administration being “under siege” by the Democrats who will not accept
responsibility for losing the election, then you might have been sleeping under
a rock for the last few months.

The latest “conspiracy theory” complete with internet
crowds of believers holds that the Sandy Hook massacre of first and second
grade children and their teachers did not happen. They misrepresent it as
another hoax (similar to trump’s attitude on global warming and climate change)
and they are harassing the grieving parents accusing them of selling their
children to a trafficking ring in smuggled children. Alex Jones, the voice of
this conspiracy theory, was recently interviewed by Megan Kelly, new host of an
MSNBC Sunday night program, recently of Fox news and trump target, is naturally
arousing vehement and also tragic emotions among the grieving parents for his
callousness contempt for the truth and for the dead children.

Formerly we had the holocaust deniers, Ernst Zundel
who lived in Toronto before his extradition
back to Germany, being one of the more prominent North American voices for
their contemptible cohort of disbelievers. And then we had the tobacco
companies denying that their products generated cancer, and pouring millions
into a disinformation campaign that stalled the truth, and sustained their
profits, while killing millions, for decades. And then we had (and still have)
global warming and climate change deniers like trump and the coal mining
companies among others whom David Suzuki characterizes as a disaster on climate
change.

Disavowing empirical facts, literally slaughtering and
then burying those facts, is a legacy of every military conflict from history.
To normalize that slaughter, far more significant and historically deforming
than all of the abortions ever performed, both therapeutic and back-alley, is a
perspective, attitude, believe and practice “up with which we will not put” (to
quote Churchill). We, all citizens on the planet, have very few defenses left
to protect us from the abuse of lying, deceiving, distorting and conspiracy
theorists who seek to dominate our lives. The truth continues to hold our only
hope for, not victory, but survival.

And we are talking about not merely political
survival, nor planetary survival, but also personal survival. If the truth can
and will be so defamed and disavowed in our public discourse, then of course it
will be denied in our professional and personal lives. Our privacy is already
threatened by the incompatibility of out-of-date laws and the out-of-control
development of technology.

Just the night before last, my wife and I were
involved in a car accident, which required our staying in our vehicle until police
arrived. While we waited, some idiot with a smart phone must have taken a
picture of the incident and posted it, without our permission and even without
our knowledge to a facebook page, for the world to witness, and from which to
draw whatever spurious conclusions. We are appalled at the abuse of our
privacy, the ubiquitous presence of snooping cameras and our total
powerlessness to prevent or to have the photo removed. (And we were not at
fault. Imagine the wrath of the other driver!)

So, pushing back must continue and also grow louder
and more effective:

·on
behalf of the grieving parents of Sandy Hook,

·the
grieving families of cancer victims whose lives were cut short by the greed and
profiteering of the tobacco companies, and

·the
countless garment workers in the developing world whose lives have ended or
been ruined by faulty building structures, greedy and unscrupulous capitalist
owner/operators and omitted monitors and inspectors from the developed world
countries and their own capitalists who cannot be excused for their complicity

·the
refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and their grieving families from
warlords who refuse to seek truce and greedy smugglers who refuse to use safe
boats

There is a growing army of people who are finding
themselves (ourselves) caught in a vortex of unscrupulous venomous and
potentially deadly conspiracy theorists, among whom must be counted the current
occupant of the Oval Office. Whether we are suffering from the conspiracy
theories of the trump campaign, the putin regime, the right-wing media, the
terrorists or the dictators like Bashar Assad, or the refusal to answer
legitimate questions by the politicians grafted to trump, we are living in a
world “under the looking glass” and that world is simply neither sustainable
nor generative of healthy living.

This morning’s news says law suits on the abuse of
power, and the non-compliance with the emoluments clause have been brought by
the Attorneys General in Maryland and
D.C. and Senator Blumenthal, respectively, against the president.

This piece applauds these legal initiatives and all
other initiatives that plead the case for truth, and the pushback against the
conspiracy theorists who wish to shape reality to conform with their tragic and
deplorable need for absolute power and control, no matter how big the
organization or how desperate the injustices they wish to perpetrate and/or deny.